2017. Error, Esseker Center Osijek

The concept of “error” is usually associated with negative connotations. But it can motivate leaving the beaten path and taking another route towards the goal – a meaning that includes the possibility of unexpected discovery of something unknown, but essentially not bad. Man as a rational being does not perceive the error as a positive thing, because it entails incompleteness, inadequacy and some kind of fault in the process. However, if we accept the error as something that reveals uncharted, hidden territories in a practice that has become all-too-familiar, it becomes a rift in the all-encompassing predictability. Exploration begins the moment we leave the safety of well-trodden paths – and studying, like travelling, means truly seeking that which is undiscovered or concealed. The error is often ascribed to coincidence, but coincidence lacks this [controlled] focus on achieving a goal, and is merely a side event in a process we are directing, while the error is essentially tied to the process itself and embedded in it as the inevitability of the unpredictable. A true error is unintentional, which distinguishes it from an experiment, so facing it presents a true challenge to any acting subject. To what extent are we, as people, ready to accept the challenge of the error and explore the new spaces it reveals? Can we not sometimes choose to sacrifice the safety of the well-trodden path to get acquainted with the unpredictable winding paths and the entire world that surrounds them, which remains hidden enough to prevent us from seeing it from our safe spots? This exhibition strived to free those exploratory capacities in students to help them grasp, through the act of creative search, the positive aspects of error as a fact of life and a fact of art.